


Moments of stillness and depth

by angeldescendant



Series: sleeping with ghosts (a requiem for ash lynx) [1]
Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Adult Eiji, After New York Sense, Ash is mentioned, Freeform, Gen, Older Ibe, Photography, Post-Canon, Reminiscence, interview format
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-11 20:09:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20159383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeldescendant/pseuds/angeldescendant
Summary: Prolific photographers Eiji Okumura and Shunichi Ibe discuss their lifelong friendship, their groundbreaking collaboration "Cape Cod, 1985", and what makes a memorable image.





	Moments of stillness and depth

**Author's Note:**

> Eiji Okumura is a freelance photographer based in New York. His works have been featured in Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and many more. He plans to publish a new photography collection after New York Sense (1999).
> 
> Shunichi Ibe is a photojournalist based in Tokyo. His first exhibit, Fly Boy in the Sky, won the Canon Photography Festival (1983) and Einstein Photo Competition (1984). He plans on collaborating with NASA for a future exhibit. He currently works for CNN.

_Translated from the Yomiuri Shimbun (August 12, 1999)._

* * *

**We have heard that Mr Okumura had been a pole-vaulting star in his youth and was discovered by Mr Ibe as a model for a photography competition. Was that the defining moment that spearheaded your careers?**

Shunichi: When I visited Eiji, I was twenty-five and loafing around art school. I really did not have a clear sense of what I wanted to do, or if I’ll even graduate at all. There was the family pressure, my relationship was on the rocks, the thought of taking education units and spending another year, a lot of things. My friends and I were still toying around the idea of joining a photography competition when I saw Eiji on TV. The next week, I took that overnight train to Izumo and requesting his adviser to meet Eiji. It was a total gamble and looking back, it was a stupid thing to do. But then the shots came out and my friends couldn’t find the right words. Everything just fitted together. After that, I didn’t look back. I finished my degree and went to Osaka then worked for a news publishing company. Eiji came to visit from time to time.

Eiji: [Laughs] Around that time I was still preoccupied with getting first place in Nationals. I think it happened eleven years ago when I returned to New York. I did some odd jobs: Walking dogs, folding boxes, selling hot dogs before I picked up a camera again. I sent some pictures over to Ibe-san and my family to let them know I was still alive [laughs]. He gave me a long talk over the phone about photographs. My three months’ work would end up paying for the phone bill.

Shunichi: I forgot you weren’t in Izumo until you hung up. You should have reminded me [laughs]

Eiji: I then worked as a tour guide for Japanese tourists and had an excuse to do some street photography. It was a gradual process. The only time I was able to have my works published in the magazine was because I befriended a Japanese editor from Kyoto, one of Ibe-san’s friends. So I ended up returning to Japan for a bit before coming back to New York. It’s tougher here, but it felt more like home.

**Mr Ibe, you mentioned in a previous interview that when it comes to taking pictures, an image is only as good as its subjects. Was that degree of challenge the main draw of photography for the both of you?**

Shunichi: Early in my career, I thought about taking the pictures because of the story behind them. I was drawn more to the sensationalist narratives I captured. Like the flag-raising of Iwo Jima, the aftermath of the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula. Photography was a sort of visual evidence, I saw my camera as an eye of history to make the past consumable. I ended up arousing feelings and dulling the viewer’s understanding. I had forgotten I was also a viewer, a beholder, projecting my own reflections on the subjects. I wanted them to adopt a particular pose. I was still staging, still making choices of what to include and exclude in the frame, tethered to my global attachments [laughs]. My job helps me overcome it while I travel to different places for different assignments. I become less an individual stuck in my viewfinder. The pictures become less passive, there’s a shared meaning to be found if you observe more closely. It humbles you. It’s comforting in a sense.

Eiji: Street photography isn’t as glamorous or as exciting, but it helps root the viewer at the moment, subjectively speaking. For me, it’s the quiet, everyday life of people that straight-up fascinates me, those little snippets.

**Like those photographs of Ash Lynx?**

Shunichi: I knew we’d end up here. 

Eiji: Unfair, go back, go back [laughs]. Those were the times we took the same set of photographs, right, Shun?

* * *

_From Cape Cod, 1985_

* * *

**Cape Cod, 1985 was unanimously called a ‘watershed moment’ in American photography, shot by two Japanese tourists of all people. Why do you think there was a significant impact, not only in photography circles but in the art world as well?**

Eiji: Because of the subject himself [laughs]. Shun and I couldn’t believe the reception would be so strong when we put it on exhibit. It was honestly funny how a picture of two teenage boys horsing around would end up being a cover of Time. Of Time [laughs]. I think New York Sense wouldn’t have taken off if it wasn’t for that, so I have you to thank [laughs].

Shunichi: What was jaw-dropping was how it still became a sensation when Ash Lynx had been gone in newsreels for ten years then. That’s what you call a legacy if you ask me. None of the poses there was staged. The lighting, composition, the stillness, everything simply clicked.

Eiji: It was one of the moments that came naturally. And yet, I think _Cape Cod_ eloquently encapsulates what makes a memorable photograph: Those who break a mould or break a silence. It provides this atmosphere of, of inexhaustible fascination. There is a disconnect from what people saw and heard from the news. There was a kind of stillness, a moment of joy and delight. All iconic photographs tend to have the issue of divorcing the harsher realities that lie behind them. But in those sets of pictures, you cannot look away.

Shunichi: The Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain calls it a ‘state of grace,’ a special kind of knowing, a feeling that you have what you’re looking for without really understanding what it is. It’s like being in tune with a much larger picture of a life.

_Cape Cod_ for me has the quality that describes something bigger than it shows. It might be a quiet moment, a kind of stillness as Eiji mentioned. Yet that’s the reason why it makes it even more forceful.

**Mr Okumura, you described your work with the word ‘tenderness’, of loving both light and darkness. Is it a celebration of fallibility?**

Eiji: Oh man, that was pretentious of me to say [laughs]. My so-called ‘Blue Period’ as Shun put it.

Shunichi: You did not know who Picasso was.

Eiji: I was more of a pop-culture sort of person. But you know, Aslan actually showed one of Picasso’s paintings to me when we visited MOMA. Gosh, tenderness [laughs] my stupid highbrow ass.

Shunichi: You still had long hair then, like a tortured artist of sorts.

Eiji: [Laughs] Good times. Yes, looking at my work now, I think I try to aim for depth, the way it arouses feelings and another level of the viewer’s understanding. Like the first time I saw my photo from Shun’s first exhibition.

Shunichi: I still remember when Eiji asked me three questions. The first one was when he saw his photo. “Is it really me?”

Eiji: I didn’t know I could make an expression like that [laughs].

Shunichi: That was the last time I saw it.

Eiji: Yeah, I’ve forgotten how to do that. When was the second one? I think I asked you too many questions.

Shunichi: The second one I remembered best was when you returned to Japan the second time and asked to borrow one of my old cameras. Eiji asked me if I ever took a picture of my ex-wife. She met him during the first photography competition.

Eiji: She was very beautiful.

Shunichi: What are you implying? She's with someone else.

Eiji: [Laughs] They won’t add this part when it’s published. You won’t, right?

Shunichi: And the third one was before he had New York Sense published. I think you were out with Sing and Akira at the time? He asked me what made me keep going. That was the first time in almost a decade I saw you tear up. I told him I wanted to capture him flying again before I died.

Eiji: It was pretty dramatic. I don’t remember that at all. How many takes did you make before we made Buddy calm down? It took the whole afternoon.

Shunichi: At least we got the perfect shot. Your mother cried when she saw the negatives and the book.

* * *

_From Cape Cod, 1985_

* * *

**Looking back, what was the photograph you took that you liked best?**

Shunichi: Definitely Fly Boy.

Eiji: Kitchen, 1987.

Shunichi: I thought you’ll say ‘Dawn.’

Eiji: [Laughs] That would be too obvious.

**With regards to your choices, what do you think makes a memorable image?**

Shunichi and Eiji: Openness.

Shunichi: I’ll go first. For me, photography is all about mystery, but also about detail. If they not only hold but suggest exhausting detail, that detail can deliver you into a larger world, making you feel tiny and huge.

Eiji: It’s an openness to interpretation, the one that doesn’t bring closure to that moment or the beholder. It haunts viewers long after their senses have soaked it in. An upwelling of sorts, something that transcends emotion and intellect. There is some kind of frontal stillness, a piercing honesty, a level of depth.

**Author's Note:**

> Angel makes scribbly comics in her free time. You can find her twitter @angeldescndnt
> 
> Pictures are from the Angel Eyes artbook.


End file.
